Sergey Brin's search for Parkinson's cure

This article was taken from the August issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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Several evenings a week, after a day's work at Google
headquarters in Mountain View, California, Sergey Brin drives up the road to a local pool. There, he
changes into swimming trunks, steps out on to a three-metre
springboard, looks at the water below, and dives. Brin is competent
at all four types of springboard diving -- forward, back, reverse
and inward. Recently, he's been working on his twists, which have
been something of a struggle. But overall, he's not bad; in 2006 he
competed in the master's division world championships. (He's quick to point out he came sixth out
of six in his event.) The diving is the sort of challenge that
Brin, who has also dabbled in yoga, gymnastics and acrobatics, is
drawn to: equal parts physical and mental exertion. "The dive
itself is brief but intense," he says. "You push off really hard
and then have to twist right away. It does get your heart rate
going." There's another benefit as well: with every dive, Brin
gains a little bit of leverage -- leverage against a risk, looming
somewhere out there, that some day he may develop the
neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson's disease. Buried deep within
each cell in Brin's body -- in a gene called LRRK2, which sits on
the 12th chromosome -- is a genetic mutation that has been
associated with higher rates of Parkinson's. Not everyone with
Parkinson's has an LRRK2 mutation; nor will everyone with the
mutation get the disease. But it does increase the chance that
Parkinson's will emerge sometime in the carrier's life to between
30 and 75 per cent. (By comparison, the risk for an average
American is about one per cent.) Sergey Brin himself splits the
difference and figures that his DNA gives him about 50-50 odds.

That's where exercise comes in. Parkinson's is a poorly
understood disease, but research has associated a handful of
behaviours with lower rates of disease, starting with exercise. One
study found that young men who work out have a 60 per cent lower
risk. Coffee, likewise, has been linked to a reduced risk. For a
time, Brin drank a cup or two a day, but he can't stand the taste
of the stuff, so he switched to green tea. ("Most researchers think
it's the caffeine, though they don't know for sure," he says.)
Smokers also seem to have a lower chance of developing Parkinson's,
but Brin has not opted to take up the habit. With every pool
workout and every cup of tea, he hopes to diminish his odds, to
adjust his algorithm by counteracting his DNA with environmental factors.

"This is all off the cuff," he says, "but let's say that based
on diet, exercise and so forth, I can get my risk down by half, to
about 25 per cent." The steady progress of neuroscience, Brin
figures, will cut his risk by around another 50 per cent --
bringing his overall chance of getting Parkinson's to around 13 per
cent. It's all guesswork, mind you, but the way that he delivers
the numbers and explains his rationale is utterly convincing.

Brin, of course, is no ordinary 36-year old. As half of the duo
that founded Google, he's worth about $15 billion. That bounty
provides additional leverage: since learning that he carries an
LRRK2 mutation, Brin has contributed some $50 million to
Parkinson's research, enough, he figures, to "really move the
needle". In light of the uptick in research into drug treatments and possible cures,
Brin adjusts his overall risk again, down to "somewhere under ten
per cent". That's still ten times the average, but it goes a long
way to counterbalancing his genetic predisposition.

It sounds so pragmatic, so obvious, that you can almost miss a
striking fact: many philanthropists have funded research into
diseases they themselves have been diagnosed with; but Brin is
likely to be the first who, based on a genetic test, began funding
scientific research in the hope of escaping a disease in the first
place.

His approach is notable for another reason. This isn't just
another variation on venture philanthropy -- the voguish
application of business-school practices to scientific research.
Brin is after a different kind of science altogether. Most
Parkinson's research, like much of medical research, relies on the classic scientific method:
hypothesis, analysis, peer review, publication. Brin proposes a
different approach, one driven by computational muscle and
staggeringly large data sets. It's a method that draws on his
algorithmic sensibility -- and Google's fabled faith in computing
power -- with the aim of accelerating the pace and increasing the
potential of scientific research. "Generally the pace of medical
research is glacial compared to what I'm used to in the internet,"
Brin says. "We could be looking in lots of places and collecting
lots of information. And if we see a pattern, that could lead
somewhere."

In other words, Brin is proposing to bypass centuries of
scientific epistemology in favour of a more Googley kind of
science. He wants to collect data first, then hypothesise, and then
find the patterns that lead to answers. And he has the money and
the algorithms to do it.

Comments

This is the most brilliant thing I have heard for years and has made me so excited. I have Ulcerative Colitis, so has my father. I would be very happy to fill in a massive questionnaire on every aspect of my life to help prevent my kids from getting this illness, or making it easier to treat.Why would this cost so much? Why can't we start now? I'm sure you could get a representative of most illnesses willing to volunteer!

Ilana

Jul 13th 2010

The definition of statistical power given in the article is wrong. The power is the probability that a study will find an effect given that the effect is real (the power is dependent on the size of effect). This is different than the probability that an effect is real given that you found it in your data.This later quantity is known as the false positive rate.

Paul S

Jul 15th 2010

Excellent approach - more info included in the process of finding pattern provide better chance to find it, and all beyond of limitation we know.Diseased tissue specific information is difficult to get without biopsy but it is not imposible anymore. I am activating research on development of blood tests to provide tissue and organ specific profile of RNA expression and protein signature. Finidng pattern characteristic of normal versus disease type organ and tissues should result in finding key components of succesful therapy; molecular target/mechanism and follow up measures. This information makes easier to find specific therapeutic tool to deal with specific mechanism(s) causing health problem. Biopsy-less and tissue- or organ-specific blood-based diagnostics could be developed sooner than expected to help people with diseases such as Parkinson, Alzheimer, dementia

zb

Aug 10th 2010

Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative

I'm really very surprised that this open and ground breaking initiative, which by all accounts aligns to Sergey's thinking about yielding returns from open data was not reported on or mentioned in this article.How can something as groundbreaking as this have been missed out? With a private and public sector reach that extends to other countries and includes the research community as much as the producer side. Very naughty

Interesting info. Well written. I have Parkinson's. I am 57 and was diagnosed with PD in 2005.I have a communication's MA degree, and yet, thus far, 15 minutes have passed since I started typing. Hmm. Not bad. Hope there's a cure on the horizon. Let me know if I can help. Would like to sound more professional, but for now, this thing, dubbed Bradykinesia, is a wicked taskmaster. And, as for now, it's sleepless in Madera. Sleeping pills aren't working, and it's 6 hours before PD meds. Whoa! What's a body to do? Okay, enough. For the record, its taken 40 minutes to type this comment. Got to be some variance of data in there somewhere. Sorry, I know this is not the venue for a comment of this nature. Thank you.-- JS